A Sequential I/O Reading List

Over the past year I’ve been collecting links on the growing trend of rooting out all random I/O in large scale distributed systems. It has always been apparent that rotational media suffered a random I/O penalty but as bandwidth improvements continue and latency improvements languish the difference between sequential and random I/O is becoming unbearable. SSDs have been hailed as a fix, and in large part they remove the pain of random reads, but at the cost of requiring sequential writes. And now, as it now turns out, even RAM benefits from sequential I/O due to the increasingly complex structure of new and faster chips. In an effort to help others who might be stumbling into this area here is a curated list of the best posts and papers I have found on the topic.